Why Should We Care?

John Malcolm Russell

Samarra, ninth century A.D.

View ofthe Great Mosquewith its spiral minaret.Photograph:John M. Russell,Massachusetts College ofArt.

One of the world's mostfamous buildings is seenhere during a rare rain­storm. Samarra was anearly capital of Islam.

In the wake of the looting of the Iraq Museum in April 2003, many of us who

work in the previously invisible field of ancient Mesopotamian art and archae­

ology found ourselves besieged by media requests for information and insights

into what had happened. One of the most popular questions, and the one I

found the most challenging, was "Why should we care?" Those of us who work

in the area do so because we care, but how to express that to an audience unfa­

miliar with even the broadest outlines of Mesopotamian culture? After several

interviews in which I tried to explain a variety of reasons why we should care,

all of which ended up being cut, I discovered that there was a "correct" answer:

"Because Iraq is the Cradle of Civilization." That, along with the obligatory list of

"firsts" (the first cities, the first monumental architecture, the first writing .. .),

would generally do the trick, and it had the advantage of requiring no reflection

at all.

But those answers left me feeling personally unsatisfied, as if they merely

replaced one question with another. Why should we care about the Cradle of

Civilization? Isn't that a bit too long ago and far away to matter today? For

Professor Bahrani the importance of ancient Iraqi culture seems clear enough.

As she so eloquently writes, ancient Mesopotamian sites and artifacts are part

of the fabric of her earliest memories. They formed her identity as they formed

that of her homeland. But are they part of my identity, formed in

the American Midwest where my first exposure to Mesopotamian

art was in college, or is this merely a neoimperialist fantasy?

For me, as a specialist in Mesopotamia and as a human, there's

a lot at stake here. In Iraq are preserved the traces of the first hunter­

gatherer families that roamed the Cradle of Civilization; the first

villagers who invented farming and herding so they could live in

one place, and then irrigation so they could live almost anyplace; the first city

dwellers who developed royalty, writing, and religion in order to manage their

environment; the first citizens of states with all the complex responsibilities that

citizenship entails. The ideas of city, citizen, civic duty, civic architecture, civiliza­

tion: all these arose first in Iraq. They discovered the civilization that we live today.

Can I legitimately claim those clever people as my ancestors too? I can think

of a couple of ways to approach that question. One is to investigate what hap­

pens if I do. Another is to see what happens if I don't. The first approach comes

more easily to me, as, legitimately or not, ancient Iraqi culture has become a

crucial part of my own sense of identity. Just how crucial is something I realized

only recently, in mid-April when the media erroneously reported that most of

the Iraq Museum's collection had been looted or destroyed. It would be perfectly

understandable to react to such news with sadness at the loss of so many beauti­

ful objects and sympathy for the great personal loss this represented for the Iraqi

people, and I must have felt those things. The feelings I remember most vividly,

however, were shock-numb, dull, clinical shock-and a physical hollowness

at my center that something critical used to fill.Talking with friends in my field,

I discovered that many of them were experiencing similar feelings, and we real­

ized that this was the grief one feels at the passing of a close loved one.

How could the loss of mere objects-the bird sculptures from Nemrik,

the Uruk Vase, the Akkadian copper head-provoke such a profound human

emotion? The answer must be that something about these objects was so deeply

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2.. WINTE R 1003

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Nimrud, walls of Atiurnasirpal's palace,ca. 875-860 B.C. Views of wall slabs sculpt­ed with Assyrian rituals and deities.Photographs: John M. Russell,Massachusetts College of Art.

The sculptures were damaged by lootersin 2003.

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Nimrud, central courtyardof Anurnasirpal's palace,ca. 875-860 B.C. View ofcolossal doorway guardianfigures of bulls with humanheads. Photograph: John M.Russell, MassachusettsCollege ofArt.

The Assyrian imperial capi­tal of Nimrud was known inancient times as Kalhu (thebiblical Calah).lt is the siteof the best-preservedAssyrian palace, included onthe World MonumentsWatch List of 100 MostEndangered Sites. The gold­filled tombs ofAssyrianqueens were discoveredunder the palace floors inI989-one of the greatestarchaeological discoveriesof all time and virtuallyunknown in the West.

I. Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness," in HeartofDarkness (New York: Modern Library, 1999),6.2. The interview took place April 16, 2003, on theprogram TheConnection ("The Lost CuituralTreasures of Baghdad," produced by WBURBoston. http://www.theconnection.org/showsI2003/04120030416_a_main.asp

ingrained in me that, when confronted with their reported loss, I felt that a

crucial part of me had died. That I felt grief suggests that I was mourning not

just the objects themselves, but also the people who survive through them,

These objects were not mere mute bits of matter, but eloquent testimonies of

the people who made them, lived with them, and died with them.

It was as if people long dead, people I had come to admire, had died again:

The people who, ten thousand years ago, took the time and developed the

skills to create sculptures of the heads of birds at the hunter-gatherer village of

Nemrik, for reasons we can only guess at, and the person who valued one of

these small sculptures so highly that he died holding it in his hand when the

roof of his burning house collapsed. The people of Uruk five thousand years ago,

who understood that civilization needs structure and embedded that structure

in the complex imagery of an alabaster cult vase, the world's first representations

of religious ritual, social hierarchy, the natural order, and urban economy. The

Akkadian rulers of Nineveh, who knew how to put a face to the idea of kingship,

and the conquerors of Nineveh, who knew that art was no match for vengeance.

The image of Saddam's bronze head dragged through the streets while being

showered with abuse would have looked very familiar to them, as would the

mobs surging through the Iraq Museum.

I must note that the only way I came to know all these interesting people

was because the objects they left behind were recovered during archaeological

excavations. It is a popular myth that objects such as these can function on their

own as primary data for the study of the past, that they can somehow be per­

suaded to "speak for themselves." As long as such antiquities are made available

to us, goes the myth, it doesn't matter where they came from or how they were

acquired. Nothing could be further from the truth. These objects, while of extra­

ordinary beauty, have little to say by themselves about the people connected with

them, Objects belong to the story of the past, but the story itself resides in the

archaeological context in which these objects are embedded.

The situation is rather like that of Marlow's stories, as described by Joseph

Conrad at the beginning of "Heart of Darkness": "The yarns of seamen have a

direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked

nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),

and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,

enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze. in

the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the

spectral illumination of moonshine." I

The story resides not in the object but in the haze: the houses, temples,

palaces, graves, farms, towns, and cities in which these objects functioned. If that

context is carelessly destroyed, as when a site is plundered for the antiquities

market, everything about the object from its geographic location to its immedi­

ate surroundings is lost. What survives are only mute fragments of a story now

lost forever. The beneficiaries of this destruction are those who value the past

solely as a source of collectible commodities. The losers are all of us who care

about the past as a place where people like ourselves lived and still live in the

myriad traces they left behind.

I have a favorite museum exercise for my unsuspecting students when

we study ancient art. Early in the term, before there's any chance they've been

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Aqar Quf, Baghdad, 1600-300 B.C. Viewof the surviving core of the ziggurat.Photograph: John M. Russell,Massachusetts College of Art.

Aqar Quf was the capital city of theKassite empire. Its ziggurat (templetower) and palace are now crumblingfrom neglect due to years of sanctions.

28 WINTER 2003

contaminated by my own biases, I take the class to a museum and divide thegroup in half. I send one half to a gallery of excavated objects and the other to

a gallery of market objects (they're not told of this difference). Each group isinstructed to examine the contents of their gallery and then to report to theother group on what they learned from it about the past. The results are alwaysthe same: the group in the gallery of unprovenanced objects talks exclusivelyabout the visual characteristics of their pieces, while the other group talks aboutthe people who used them. Both groups conclude that only the excavated objectshave given them any window into the past.

To return now to my initial inquiry, what happens if I don't honor the

ancient Iraqis as my ancestors? My most moving experience in the days imme­diately following the looting of the Iraq Museum was participating in a discus­

sion via satellite phone with Ahmed Abdullah Faddam, professor of sculptureat Baghdad's College of Fine Arts, on National Public Radio.' Professor Ahmedwas very eloquent about what the losses at the museums and libraries meant forthe future of the Iraqi people, a point also stressed by Professor Bahrani. But hismost chilling comment transcended nationalism: "What can you do with a manwho is ignorant and doesn't have any culture? He is just like a dead man."

He is also a very dangerous man, this empty vessel waiting to be filled withdross. Having a past, having a sense of who we are, allows us to measure our­

selves against what political demagogues or market forces say we should be.These are the ones with no use for the past. That's why they burn books, eitherliterally as in Nazi bonfires or figuratively in the blinding glow of the televisionscreen. Without a sense of our past as the core of who we are, we risk beingwhatever we're told we are.

This is especially critical for Iraq today. Professor Ahmed observed, "If acountry's history is lost, what is left of its present and future?" As citizens of

a multisect, multiethnic country carved out of one empire by another less thana century ago and ruled ever since by foreigners, kings, and dictators, Iraqis can

now draw on the variety and depth of their land's rich heritage for commontraits that define them as a people and as a nation. After all, Iraq's cultural diver­sity is nothing new.The modern regional divisions of Shia, Sunni, and Kurdcorrespond roughly to ancient Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria, different lands andpeoples who over time created a common culture.

And what about the rest of us? As citizens of another young country, onewhose idea of civilization is characterized by selfish nationalism and con­sumerism, Americans also need the past as a reminder that there have beenother goals and ideals. It is the people of the past who civilize us. If we don't

acknowledge them as our ancestors, then God help us.

John Malcolm Russell is chair of the Critical Studies Department, Massachusetts College of Art. A memberof the UNESCO Cultural Heritage Mission to Baghdad this past May,he is the author of four books,includingThe Final Sackaf Nineveh: TheDiscovery, Documentation, and Destructionof Sennacherib's ThroneRoom at Nineveh, lroq (YaleUniversity Press, 1998). In September the Coalition Provisional Authorityappointed him deputy senior advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Culture. jrussell@massart.edu

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